Juno News - April 24, 2025


Carney is accused of misleading Canadians about the country’s finances

Mentioned
Mark Carney
China accused of targeting Conservatives ahead of election Carney called out for  misleading Canadians about call with Trump

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

183.6

Word count

397

Sentence count

5


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we take a deep dive into the difference between an operating and capital deficit, and why the Liberal government is confusing us with a new accounting system for federal spending. We also discuss the impact of the Bank of Canada's recent budget, and how it may have changed the way we account for federal government spending.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Okay, let's switch over then and start talking about Mark Carney's budget, because one of the
00:00:04.240 things that you just mentioned is this kind of sleight of hand that seems to be taking place
00:00:08.860 with the difference between a capital deficit or a capital budget and operational budget.
00:00:15.220 And so, you know, typically you would assume that, you know, operations is the day-to-day
00:00:19.620 spending of the government, and then the capital spending is investments in the future. And somehow
00:00:24.460 in mark carney's costed platform uh budget he sort of increased the number of things that you could
00:00:31.420 typically uh discuss uh describe as being investments in the country and so that that
00:00:36.700 was sort of a way that he could say that he you know he's not racking up as much deficit as
00:00:42.380 possible could you help us understand like what what he did and why is that allowed like how is
00:00:47.980 it that a prime minister could just like change the way that we account of our federal spending
00:00:53.260 Well, first of all, the federal government and all the provinces have adopted capital
00:00:57.660 budgeting for a long time now. And in fact, you calculate an operating budget where you subtract
00:01:03.820 off from the revenues received and all the costs of running the government, including depreciation
00:01:10.780 costs on capital. And then you might have a capital budget that you report the capital,
00:01:18.540 and then as it depreciates you you know provide a stock but uh that's been done you know by the
00:01:25.100 provinces and and the federal government for for some time but there's always this issue about what
00:01:29.820 you call capital and if you put money into a bunch of funds uh that uh may not be spent until later
00:01:37.100 time you're not necessarily creating capital uh or at least not much capital and and so it's very
00:01:41.980 confusing actually uh in terms of what is being called capital uh in without further explanation
00:01:48.060 coming from the liberal party and so when i look at all this so-called capital expenditure it looks
00:01:54.060 like to me it's just a bunch of money to be put aside to be spent in the future in fact they talk
00:02:01.180 about you know cash costs versus accrual accounting and it does sound like they're
00:02:05.900 they're naming a lot of things as capital but it's not clear it really is capital